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“Tonight’s show may trigger strong emotions,” warned placards posted at various points around Roy Thomson Hall for Gord Downie’s Toronto performance of Secret Path on Friday night were entirely unnecessary.

You’d signed up for strong emotions the moment you scored a ticket to this gig, even if you’d somehow managed to remain oblivious to the event’s broader context as an ambitious exercise in social activism.

The performance was dedicated to and inspired by the short, sad life of Chanie Wenjack — who died of exposure at 12 years old on Oct. 22, 1966, after fleeing the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora while trying to walk 600 kilometres home to the family in Ogoki Point from which he’d been pointlessly rent by Canadian government policy. The accompanying multimedia presentation was both a searing indictment of this country’s appalling institutional treatment of its First Nations peoples and a touching, elegiac homage to a young Ojibway boy who passed away alone needlessly and beyond tragically 50 years ago beside a railroad track in northern Ontario without even the cold comfort of knowing he might someday become a symbol of the need for change.

Secret Path is the story Chanie Wenjack, 12, and his death from exposure after fleeing the Cecilia Jeffrey residential school in 1966. (Rene Johnston)

So think about Wenjack for a second, shuddering into his final sleep next to a CN rail line after walking doggedly into a doomed wilderness nowhere for days clad in nothing but a windbreaker, literally carrying nothing but “seven matches in a jar” — to borrow a Downie lyric from Secret Path — because the hope of seeing his family again was better than the “civilization” and Christianity and “White Canada”-ness imposed upon him in that residential school.

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Then think of the 150,000 other indigenous children like him who were ripped apart from their loved ones and their ancestral lands and their languages and their cultures to be “parented” by colonial and church doctrine towards an Acceptable Version of Canadian Adulthood for 130 years. Then think about why you’re always reading about the awful conditions and the awful things going on in this or that Indigenous community that occasionally makes the headlines for multiple suicides or toxic water supplies and you’ll understand “strong emotions.”

The spectacle of Downie, two months off what might have been his final tour fronting the Tragically Hip, constantly pacing back and forth in theatrical, first-person facsimile of Wenjack’s determined march towards oblivion whilst struggling publically with terminal brain cancer only lent the heavier-than-heavy material more weight during Friday’s performance. But he made it clear this evening was not about him.

He and what older brother Mike Downie termed a “fantastic band of friends” — featuring Secret Path co-producers Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene and Dave Hamelin of the Stills, Barenaked Ladies’ Kevin Hearn, Skydiggers’ Josh Finlayson and Charles Spearin of BSS/Do Make Say Think — ran through the entire album beneath a big screen playing an animated film based on the striking artwork from its accompanying graphic novel by Jeff Lemire, with Downie gracefully ceding the spotlight to Wenjack and giving him the voice he never had.

Downie and friends played beneath a big screen showing an animated film based on the striking artwork from the "Secret Path" accompanying graphic novel by Jeff Lemire. (Rene Johnston)

The entire Wenjack family looked on from the front rows.

It was all spectacularly, tragically alive in a way that probably won’t be matched unless Downie and the band add more dates to the two they did this week in Ottawa and Toronto.

Secret Path’s union of music and visuals is powerful enough when you’re listening to the record and flipping through the book, yet having Lemire’s stark, two-colour drawings brought life in front of you while Downie gradually crumpled to the stage in emulation of Wenjack’s fate during the second side’s slow, certain march towards the end — briefly climaxing with a bristling punch at the gods in the form of “Haunt Them, Haunt Them, Haunt Them” before the truly lovely “The Only Place to Be” ushered in the bittersweet warmth of acceptance — was almost too much to bear.

Then “Here, Here and Here” came around, with its ambient, into-the-netherworld mantra of “I lived / Here, here and here / I died / Here, here and here” and it really was too much to bear.

A good chunk of the sold-out crowd looked genuinely stricken when the lights came up. As well they should have, given the subject matter and the circumstances of its presentation. The sadder truth of the matter was that, had this three-year labour of love on Downie’s part been completed before he threatened to leave us forever, he might never have been able to catapult Wenjack’s story to the forefront of Canadian public discourse in the manner he has.

Fittingly, tears mopped up by tissues were collected on the way out in birch buckets to later be burned in sacred fire at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg.

“Let’s not celebrate the last 150 years,” said Downie towards the end. “Let’s just start celebrating the next 150 years. Just leave it alone.”

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